Chapter XII.—Of the Fact that the God of the Jews, After the Subjugation of that People, Was Still Not Accepted by the Romans,
Because His Commandment Was that He Alone Should Be Worshipped, and Images Destroyed.

18. Furthermore, that Hebrew nation, which, as I have said, was commissioned to prophesy of Christ, had no other God but one
God, the true God, who made heaven and earth, and all that therein is. Under His displeasure they were ofttimes given into
the power of their enemies. And now, indeed, on account of their most heinous sin in putting Christ to death, they have been
thoroughly rooted out of Jerusalem itself, which was the capital of their kingdom, and have
been made subject to the Roman empire. Now the Romans were in the habit of propitiating555555 The text gives deos…colendos propitiare. Five mss. give deos…colendo propitiare.—Migne. the deities of those nations whom they conquered by worshipping these themselves, and they were accustomed to undertake the
charge of their sacred rites. But they declined to act on that principle with regard to the God of the Hebrew nation, either
when they made their attack or when they reduced the people. I believe that they perceived that, if they admitted the worship
of this Deity, whose commandment was that He only should be worshipped, and that images should be
destroyed, they would have to put away from them all those objects to which formerly they had undertaken to do religious
service, and by the worship of which they believed their empire had grown. But in this the falseness of their demons mightily
deceived them. For surely they ought to have apprehended the fact that it is only by the hidden will of the true God, in whose
hand resides the supreme power in all things, that the kingdom was given them and has been made to increase, and that their
position was not due to the favour of those deities who, if they could have wielded any influence whatever in that matter,
would rather have protected their own people from being over-mastered by the Romans, or would have brought the Romans themselves
into complete subjection to them.

19. Certainly they cannot possibly affirm that the kind of piety and manners exemplified by them became objects of love and
choice on the part of the gods of the nations which they conquered. They will never make such an assertion, if they only recall
their own early beginnings, the asylum for abandoned criminals and the fratricide of Romulus. For when Remus and Romulus established
their asylum, with the intention that whoever took refuge there, be the crime what it
might be with which he stood charged, should enjoy impunity in his deed, they did not promulgate any precepts of penitence
for bringing the minds of such wretched men back to a right condition. By this bribe of impunity did they not rather arm the
gathered band of fearful fugitives against the states to which they properly belonged, and the laws of which they dreaded?
Or when Romulus slew his brother, who had perpetrated no evil against 85him, is it the case that his mind was bent on
the vindication of justice, and not on the acquisition of absolute power? And is it true that the deities did take their
delight in manners like these, as if they were themselves enemies to their own states, in so far as they favoured those who
were the enemies of these communities? Nay rather, neither did they by deserting them harm the one class, nor did they by
passing over to their side in any sense help the other. For they have it not in their power to give kingship or to remove
it. But
that is done by the one true God, according to His hidden counsel. And it is not His mind to make those necessarily blessed
to whom He may have given an earthly kingdom, or to make those necessarily unhappy whom He has deprived of that position.
But He makes men blessed or wretched for other reasons and by other means, and either by permission or by actual gift distributes
temporal and earthly kingdoms to whomsoever He pleases, and for whatsoever period He chooses, according to the
fore-ordained order of the ages.